


happened to home

by kittu9



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, literary schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-01
Updated: 2011-06-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 00:24:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/206832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a nice day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	happened to home

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Cat Power’s “The Coat is Always On.” First posted in 2005 or 2006, in a slightly different format and under the title “An elegy regarding bared knees, liquid sunshine, the quiescence of small things.”

It was a quintessential Saturday morning, pleasantly so; the sun had deigned to shine and Winry had laughingly followed him and Den out-of-doors, grease spotting the apples of her cheeks and collecting beneath her short fingernails. She had pulled along with them a picnic lunch, her toolkit, an anatomy textbook that had belonged to her mother that her father had written love-letters in with his spidery, intern’s script (this was one of her more treasured possessions, Ed knew, though she rarely looked at it; the heartache wasn’t so very fresh, but she tried above most every other thing to look forward, to never become burden, to not be swallowed whole by her grief).

 

They walked through the town to one of the fields near the river, where one could barely hear the clatter of machinery from the nearby farms. Passing by the café, and the hardware shop, she was greeted with cheerful exclamations and whistles, catcalls that were perhaps companionable; Winry laughed at the boys and smiled at the older men, tossing her bright hair over her shoulder (it reminded him briefly of the sun coming through a window). Ed felt a rush of—shock? Embarrassment? Jealousy?—flush his face, and he fought with himself quickly, lest he, fuming, seize her elbow and drag her past her adoring public. He needn’t have worried; she laughed at the beginnings of the scowl on his face and hooked her free arm through his (the left, real one, he could feel the pliancy of her flesh through his shirtsleeves).

 

“I like it when you let me laugh at you,” she remarked, apropos of nothing—this was another of her small quirks, one he sometimes tolerated, similar to the way that she occasionally laughed off his tendency towards both melancholy and outbursts that verged on the edge of violent psychosis. He was half-propped against a convenient rock, struggling out of his shirt, a sandwich clenched between his teeth (his cheeks are a little like a squirrel’s, he ate copiously, without grace); already he had removed his prosthetic leg, she had it leant against her hip, a screwdriver and a very small pair of pliers poised above it. Her pockets jangled with the disharmonic sound of ball-bearings rolling against a myriad collection of screws. Ed’s eyes didn’t quite go wide at her remark, though he did quirk an eyebrow at her, and she laughed again, and he chewed thoughtfully and thought about how nice it was to be able to sit here, sedentary, without burdens.

 

They sat out by the river for the rest of the day, and just before evening fell properly (and just before they stumbled home, hungry and a little aching and just realizing the full extent of their sunburns) they waded in the shallower water—he balanced on one foot and she steadied him, and the mud filtered between their toes. There were little fish in the water and they fled to and fro above their feet, perhaps questing for worms. Ed wasn’t quite sure when he had ever felt so light, so unencumbered.

 

He had just thought about how fond he was of Winry, despite and because of her eccentricities and her fluctuations between exuberance and quiet; he was almost considering kissing her, that line between her jaw and cheek—it was the laughability of her sunburn, he was sure, she looked so essential and carefree and lovely—and as they walked up the last of the road home, Al came out to meet them on the front porch and Ed felt the weight of every endeavor he had sworn to undertake crash down upon him again, all the worse for having put it in the back of his mind for those few hours.

 

They parted ways in the morning and although she embraced Al as always, when she said good-bye to him Winry tucked her head down against his shoulder for a moment, inhaled, and Ed wondered if she too was searching for the essence of all of those summers past, before.

 


End file.
